The Murder of Lauren Morris

May 27

Meet Lauren Morris

In March 1987, 18-year-old Lauren Morris, a junior at Rhode Island’s Bristol High School, entered the state science fair with her presentation, “Effects of Passive Smoking.” Everyone knew smoking was bad for you, but the dangers of second-hand smoke were not as well-known among the general public. Lauren obtained medical equipment to measure participants’ vital signs and breath, and found that when non-smokers were subjected to second-hand smoke, they had higher pulse rates and significant levels of carbon monoxide. Working on this award-winning project inspired her to quit smoking herself.

Even before she graduated from Bristol High in 1988, Lauren had enrolled in the Community College of Rhode Island’s respiratory therapy program. CCRI wasn’t far from home in Bristol—about 35 minutes north, in Lincoln, Rhode Island, a town north of Providence.

Though she was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, Lauren spent her whole childhood in Bristol, Rhode Island. At 18, she was living with her mother and her 12-year-old sister Patrice, who said of her, “I looked up to her. She was the most beautiful girl in the world.” The family lived in a modest 3-bedroom home on a quiet residential street. Patrice and Lauren shared a bedroom; she recalled that when her mom would hound them to clean up the room, Lauren would stuff everything under her bed. After her parents divorced, Lauren was especially close with her mother. The two women relied on each other. Karen said that whenever the song “Lean on Me” played on the radio, Lauren would say, “Cheer up, Mom, our song is playing.”

A staff member at Bristol High said, “She got along with everybody—teachers, students—she was just always there to perk people up.” One of the Brownies that Lauren led said, “[she] made you feel like you were special and important.” According to her uncle, “she just loved life” and “was interested in helping the [disabled] and […] the elderly.” She was also a normal teenager who liked hanging out with her girlfriends and listening to Pink Floyd. Her friends described her as someone who laughed easily.

Lauren’s Disappearance

On Monday, July 18, 1988, 18-year-old Lauren was excited. She had wrapped up her senior year and had a plan for the future—she would soon begin classes at CCRI and she was going to get her own car.

On that Monday afternoon, Lauren took the bus into Providence, made her way to her mom’s office—the Girl Scouts of America—and borrowed her car to do some errands. She agreed to return at 4:00PM when her mom was getting off of work. Lauren’s most important errand was withdrawing $250 from her credit union on Francis Street for a downpayment on a used car.

An hour later, at 4:00PM, Lauren’s mother wrapped up at work and waited for her daughter to return, but she never appeared. It was unlike her to be so late... Karen waited for an hour before giving up and taking the bus home to Bristol at 5:00PM. Lauren was supposed to start work at 5:00PM at D’Angelo’s sandwich shop in Bristol, but she didn’t show up for that either. When she didn’t come home after her scheduled shift, Karen knew something was wrong. Just after midnight, she reported Lauren missing. She told police that her “daughter would always call if she was going to be late.”

Discovery of Lauren’s body and investigation

The next morning—Tuesday, July 19th—at 10:00AM, a CVS Samaritan, employed by the pharmacy and trained to provide roadside assistance, was driving along Route 10 in Cranston, a neighboring city to Providence. They noticed a car stopped on the highway’s breakdown lane next to Spectacle Pond. The beige 1985 Pontiac showed no obvious signs of trouble. Not seeing the driver in the area, they left a sticker with a time stamp, got back in the CVS van, and drove away.

At 1:00PM, a Cranston Police Officer saw the same car. He stopped and knocked on the windows and peered inside, but there was no one there. He saw the CVS sticker on the driver’s side window, and might have assumed the driver, or a tow truck, would retrieve the vehicle soon.

The car sat there all day, thousands of cars passing by.

Late that night, at 11:30PM, another Cranston police officer noticed the abandoned car. He ran the plates and discovered the car belonged to the mother of a missing girl from the town of Bristol, which was about 35 minutes away. It had been over 12 hours since the CVS sticker had been left there. He found the doors unlocked, and looked inside. There was a pool of blood on the passenger side floor soaking into the rug. There was a purse in the vehicle containing Lauren’s ID and $50 cash. Everything else in the car looked normal.

Seeing evidence of foul play in the car, the officer searched the immediate area. He stepped over the guardrail toward the pond, passed through a line of trees, and walked carefully down the embankment. Nothing there. Flashlight in hand, he walked towards a small inlet hidden by the trees. In the darkness, he saw something floating there, close to the shore. He turned his flashlight toward it. It was Lauren’s body. A She was inside the center of a tire—its rubber wrapped around her torso, and she was face-down in the pond.

She was nearly nude. She was wearing a bra with a broken strap that was pushed up. Her form-fitting jeans had been removed, but still clung to one ankle. She was wearing her everyday jewelry: a watch, chain necklaces, rings on both hands, and earrings. Her shoes had been placed neatly on the shore. Police thought she was assaulted because there were signs of a struggle in the car, including pink buttons ripped from her shirt. It seemed likely she had been raped.

Her autopsy revealed she’d been hit on the back of the head several times with a blunt object, but that was not the cause of death. It was, however, the source of the blood that had been found on the front floorboards of the car. The ME ruled that the cause of death was drowning—water was found in her lungs. Police believe she may have been knocked unconscious and thrown into the pond.

Police had a lot of suspects, but they were found by rounding up known criminals and ‘suspicious’ men in the area. 50 people were interviewed, 25 people polygraphed, and some were hypnotized. None of these leads went anywhere.

Lauren disappeared during a narrow window of time—about an hour. She was seen alive at 3:00PM at the bank, and she was expected back at her mom’s work at 4:00PM.

Detective Santagata: “We believe she was in the pond from the moment the assault happened. We believe something occurred in the vehicle from whoever [was in the car] with her to the time she got to the pond from the evidence that was in the car. She wasn't driving from the way the blood stain was in the car. She was in the passenger seat. So, something happened in the car and we think that she was hit over the head and made possibly knocked out, and then she came to, causing this person to pull over to the side of the road.”

A Modern Investigation

Police inaction frustrated Lauren’s family. Like too many families of Rhode Island murder victims, they felt abandoned and struggled to move on. Patrice said, “my family was destroyed.”

Since 2013, Sue Cormier, with the Pawtucket PD, has been working on cold cases in her jurisdiction and around the state. She was instrumental in creating the Rhode Island Cold Case Cards—a deck of playing cards with details about unsolved cases on each card.

Patrice said of her mother, “She disliked cops very strongly after my sister’s murder. There were so many inconsistencies with them. But Sue came along and restored my faith in the police. She is a great human being.” Before that, Patrice spoke about having been resigned to her sister’s case remaining unsolved.

The decks were distributed in Rhode Island’s prison system. Lauren is the 10 of Hearts. Murder, She Told previously featured the stories of Rita Bouchard, the Ace of Spades, Kimberly Morse, the 7 of clubs, and Diane Drake, the Queen of Clubs.

In 2020, Patrice hosted a fundraising event at Pawtucket’s Boulevard Grille and Cigar Lounge that raised $5,000 for Cold Case Rhode Island.

Though Sue Cormier has done some meaningful work on Lauren’s case, she has gotten herself into some hot water, too. She charged a man in 2019 for the unsolved case of Christine Cole from 1988. Those charges were soon dropped by the attorney general’s office, and the man hired a civil rights attorney to bring a federal lawsuit against the Town of Pawtucket and Sue Cormier personally. Through that suit it came to light that Sue Cormier had not consulted with any prosecutors prior to bringing the charges, nor did she include them in the press conference she immediately held regarding the arrest, which was out of step with standard practice. It created the impression that she was primarily seeking public credit for herself. She also misrepresented the DNA evidence. The case was settled out of court for $1M in December of 2024, and Sue Cormier retired in 2022.

Cranston PD has taken a fresh look at the case when it was taken over by current lead detective Robert Santagata.

Detective Santagata: “She was a fighter. She probably would've fought back. She wouldn't have just given in. And the way the evidence was found leads me to believe that she was fighting to get away and at one point fighting for her life. I don't think there really was a motive. I think she was just an innocent girl that was just an unfortunate victim of a random crime.”

If you have any information about the murder of Lauren Morris from 1988, please call Detective Robert Santagata of the Cranston Police Department at (401) 477-5169 or submit a tip to the Rhode Island AG’s Office Cold Case Unit at (401) 468-2233 or email them at riagcoldcase@riag.ri.gov.

This text has been adapted from the Murder, She Told podcast episode, The Murder of Lauren Morris. To hear Lauren’s full story and Detective Santagata’s interview, find Murder, She Told on your favorite podcast platform.

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